Animal’s Daily Taxifornia News

Why do people call California “Taxifornia”? Here’s one reason: California regulators wanted to tax cellphone text messages. They were even considering making the tax retroactive. It just shows there’s nothing in California that can’t be taxed.

As always, the state government had what it believed is a good reason for imposing the tax: It would subsidize phone service for low-income Californians. And it suggested that the tax is so small — “just” $44.5 million a year — that cellphone users wouldn’t even notice it.

California has turned the richest state in the union, and once a middle-class haven, into a state with the most poor people and fully a third of all the nation’s welfare recipients. Now middle-class Californians are fleeing. Pretty soon no one will be left to pay for “low-income Californians.”

The California Public Utilities Commission’s (PUC) dropped its plan to vote on the measure in January, but only after the Federal Communications Commission ruled that text messages can’t be taxed as a telecom service. Nevertheless, the PUC will soon need money. Why? Its spending on the so-called Public Purpose Program budget has soared from $670 million in 2011 to $998 million in 2017, a 49% increase.

California is certainly following the Reagan comment about government: “If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. If it stops moving, subsidize it.” But the real idiocy of this is that, as the article notes, folks will just switch to other methods. Facebook apparently has a messenger app, and if this were to pass you’d see a wealth of messaging apps pop up like clover blossoms after a spring rain.

And, clear as day, when this happens I can see the taxers wanting to either ban those apps or tax them as well. There’s just no end to the stupidity.

Sometimes I think that the entire California legislature has not one brain among them.